Things were good for a while. “Mohamed and I, we sort of settled
in like a married couple,” Gross says. El-Erian kept even more
extreme hours than Gross did, sleeping from 9 p.m. until 1 a.m.,
spending time on his op-eds and other prolific media output, and
hitting the office around 4:30 or 5 a.m. He and Gross
corresponded all day—mainly by e-mail, even though they sat next
to each other, because Gross doesn’t like to be interrupted. When
he wasn’t traveling, El-Erian would move at about 9 a.m. from the
trading floor to his office in the executive wing to tackle his
management duties. According to former colleagues,
El-Erian regularly referred to a list his daughter had made of
all the recitals and other milestones he’d missed.